A New Decade

Elsevier wasn't the only publishing company that struggled in the precarious years of the late 1980s. Robert Maxwell’s media empire began to crumble at the end of the decade. Maxwell, who had once attempted a hostile takeover of Elsevier, now approached the company, hoping to sell Pergamon — the jewel in the crown. Pergamon, founded in 1948 and incorporated as Pergamon Press in 1951, was a company that specialized in founding new journals in emerging areas of science, filling a need to respond to the rapid development of scholarly subdisciplines that was not being addressed by the academic societies. Pergamon’s 400 titles would make a superb addition to Elsevier’s collection. Although the company produced many prestigious journals, its most famous were Tetrahedron and Tetrahedron Letters. Those journals were co-founded by Robert Burns Woodward, a chemist who published his 1965 Nobel-Prize-winning work on the synthesis of strychnine and respertine in Tetrahedron. Pergamon also published Acta Metallurgica (now titled Acta Materiala) and major reference works such as The International Encyclopedia of Education and The Encyclopedia of Material Science and Engineering. The addition of such titles promised not only to enhance and expand the range of Elsevier’s list (adding a significant social science program) but also to round out the international component of the business, giving the company a large British presence. The £440 million sale was finalized in 1991, a promising start to the new decade.

Acquiring the prestigious English medical journal The Lancet later that same year just put the icing on the cake. The Lancet, which had been founded in 1823 by the radical independent physician Thomas Wakely and retained his spirit of independence, had been at the leading edge of medicine for over 160 years, breaking stories from the discovery of penicillin in 1940 to HIV transmission in 1984. Acquiring The Lancet would help put Elsevier at the head of the field of medical publishing as well as scientific publishing.

Reed

No sooner, it seemed, had Elsevier completed its own merger with Pergamon and acquired The Lancet than the Elsevier NV parent company began negotiations with Reed, a papermaking company turned media conglomerate with interests ranging from women’s magazine publishing to trade printing to old-fashioned papermaking. The 1993 Reed merger brought new strength to Elsevier Science Publishers through the addition of the titles of Butterworth-Heinemann, publisher of the so-called "Four American Journals." These four titles — The American Journal of Cardiology, The American Journal of Surgery, The American Journal of Medicine, and, incongruously, Urology— are all large-circulation subscription journals for medical practitioners. Their addition added breadth to Elsevier’s growing healthcare publications. The Reed Elsevier merger was not all about titles however, and with it came the predictable challenges of large-scale operational change.

Globalization

Although there had been much talk of integration and restructuring over the previous few years, the Reed merger clearly created an imperative for action. Thus, in the early 1990s, Elsevier management implemented a deliberate new policy of globalization. First they implemented a single organizational structure within the company. Previously, Elsevier had been a federalist entity, with its divisions separated by geographic boundaries, a structure that caused unnecessary overlap. Now the company was to be reorganized along product lines, grouping together like products and staff in a way that reflected the lack of international barriers in science itself. Next, Elsevier implemented a new international editorial structure — designed to bring together and strengthen the company’s considerable, yet geographically dispersed, editorial resources. An international editorial structure encouraged new cooperative editorial boards to not only share resources but to combine knowledge and expertise.

Although the new organizational and editorial structures helped the company achieve a sense of global identity, there was still a need for the newly expanded company to realize a shared identity, a shared history. This took a little more time. It would be the technological revolution that the company experienced at the end of the 1990s that gave everyone in the company the opportunity to share a genuine historic moment — the successful launch of electronic science publishing — what M. Stuart Lynn has described as "the second Gutenberg Revolution."2

Electronic Distribution

From the very beginning of the 1990s (and earlier) the company had been aware of a pressing need to develop electronic systems and services to revolutionize the way Elsevier delivered information. From 1991 to 1995 Elsevier conducted what even competitors would agree was the largest experiment of its kind in this period, the TULIP project. TULIP was an experimental university licensing program that tested new methods of electronic journal distribution over local university networks. The program began by delivering 42 Elsevier and Pergamon journals in materials science and engineering — about 2,000 pages weekly — to nine American universities (16 counting all eight campuses of the University of California) and grew to over 80 journals by the final year. The system was both important and impressive, but not without its teething problems. Although TULIP did distribute the information as promised, this experiment started in the pre-web browser era, and therefore each university had to develop its own implementation for the locally hosted files, a task that proved to be a great challenge for some partners. Nevertheless the program was an extraordinary innovation, one that would lead straight to a commercial offering of all journals for local hosting (Elsevier Electronic Subscriptions) and then to the hugely successful ScienceDirect®.

In 1997, after almost two decades of experimentation with information technology, Elsevier launched ScienceDirect, a web-accessible online full-text database of Elsevier’s entire STM journal collection. ScienceDirect marked a revolution in the way scientists accessed, retrieved and shared information around the world. Selling this new service called for the creation of an international network of regional sales offices (including the expansion of the Asia Pacific office), another major investment in building sophisticated new expertise. The company’s digital revolution created other new challenges, not least of which was the question of how to preserve digital information indefinitely while still ensuring easy access, regardless of the changing nature of technology.

Digital Archives

In a first step towards the creation of a complete archive of a unified collection of Elsevier publications, in 2002 the company embarked on a digital preservation project with Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), the National Library of the Netherlands. Elsevier provided the library with digital copies of its entire ScienceDirect journal collection (including backfiles of The Lancet dating back 180 years and backfiles of all of its journals back to volume 1, number 1, the result of a $40 million investment Elsevier made to capture its entire journal heritage in digital form). In turn, Koninklijke Bibliotheek created the first independent digital archive of Elsevier’s publishing history. Realizing the significance of the KB collaboration, today Elsevier has continued to explore archiving initiatives with other institutions around the world, in an ongoing effort to ensure maximum protection for the archive.

These archival projects are on a scale never before imagined, as by the year of its anniversary — 2005 — Elsevier has grown into the largest STM publishing company, producing more than 1,800 journals and more than 3,000 new books each year. Part of the company’s growth came through the traditional acquisition of unique companies that added breadth and depth to the Elsevier range of products, such as MDL (Molecular Designs Limited), a software development company serving the pharmaceutical, agrochemical and biotechnology industries; Engineering Information, an electronic engineering information distribution company, home to Engineering Village 2™; and Cell Press, publisher of the prestigious journal Cell. Founded in 1974 as "a journal of exciting biology" by Dr. Benjamin Lewin, Cell is notable for publishing such Nobel Prize-winning breakthroughs as Infectious Prion Proteins and Olfactory Receptor Cloning. The acquisition of such properties clearly enhanced both Elsevier’s collection of titles and products as well as its reputation.

Harcourt

However, the company’s most dramatic growth at the start of the new millennium was achieved, of course, after Harcourt put itself up for sale and most of it was acquired by Reed Elsevier, including an educational publishing group that became a fourth piece in the Reed Elsevier collection (along with Elsevier in science and medicine, LexisNexis in law and Reed Business in trade magazines and exhibitions). Harcourt brought with it a long and rich medical publishing heritage courtesy of imprints like Mosby, Saunders and Churchill Livingstone. To name but a few of their publishing achievements, those three companies between them have produced The Harriet Lane Handbook, Total Patient Care, the original Gray’s Anatomy, Dorland’s Medical Dictionary, The Cecil Textbook of Medicine, Noyes Modern Clinical Psychiatry, Mosby’s Medical Nursing and Allied Health Dictionary, Robbins & Cotran’s Pathologic Basis of Disease, and Miller’s Anatomy of the Dog, a text which originally made W.B. Saunders America’s leading veterinary publisher. Additionally, in the Harcourt purchase Elsevier acquired MD Consult, a unique electronic reference service for doctors and healthcare providers, used widely in American medical schools and hospitals. Soon after, in May 2002, Elsevier further added to its offerings for medical practitioners with the acquisition of Hanley & Belfus, Inc., a Philadelphia-based publisher founded in 1984 by John Hanley and Linda Belfus (former W.B. Saunders executives). Hanley & Belfus produces texts for medical students that are renowned for being reader-friendly: its Secrets Series offers an innovative interactive approach to medical textbook publishing.

A Rich History

Although the list of titles and products added to the Elsevier collection via the process of mergers and acquisitions is impressive, no list can convey the richness of the publishing history that accompanies those titles and products. When Elsevier acquired W.B. Saunders — founded by Walter Burns Saunders in 1888 in Philadelphia — in the Harcourt purchase it also acquired a special piece of American history: the story of The Kinsey Report. That story mirrors the history of science as well as science publishing: risky, unpredictable, daring and potent with intellectual reward. In the 1930s Alfred Kinsey had conducted in-depth interview-based research on sexual behavior, determined to redress a yawning gap in the scientific record. Anticipating the interest of a small audience of psychiatrists and other professionals, the publisher Lawrence Saunders authorized a small first printing (25,000 copies) of what he considered a limited-audience medical book. To his surprise, upon its release in 1948 The Kinsey Report sold out within two days, in spite of opposition from conservative political and religious groups, because it offered Americans the first publicly available, frank and scientific discussion of sex. The Kinsey Report, which took a daring step away from the traditional medical textbook collection of Saunders, would prove the company’s willingness to push the boundaries of social norms to advance scientific knowledge.

Indeed all the companies acquired by Elsevier in the Harcourt acquisition brought something special to the Elsevier collection. Academic Press, a company started in the U.S. in 1942 by two European science publishers, Walter Johnson and Kurt Jacoby, who had fled the Nazis, brought with it a tradition of intellectual rigor that paralleled that of Elsevier. The company’s most important title, Virology, was edited for many years by another refugee from war-torn Europe, the Italian Salvador Luria who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1969 for his discovery of the replication mechanism and genetic structure of viruses.

Gray's Anatomy

The Harcourt acquisition also added the titles of Churchill Livingstone, a medical publishing company originally established in London as J&A Churchill in 1728, that boasted a list of medical books dating back to 1688. The most famous of all Churchill Livingstone publications is Gray’s Anatomy. Up until the mid-nineteenth century the study of anatomy was limited to the dissection rooms of teaching hospitals and pocket-sized textbooks with tiny illustrations. Hoping to create a useful tool for the medical students he taught at St. George’s Hospital in London, Dr. Gray wrote a new text that was simultaneously more detailed, clear and confident than existing texts. He then recruited his friend Henry Carter to provide large and highly detailed illustrations. The result, first published in 1858, was the first edition of what would become one of the best-selling medical books of all times. Today in its 39th edition, and now available electronically as well as in print, Gray’s Anatomy continues to innovate with its descriptions of radiological anatomy and new microanatomy images.

Mosby

Whereas Saunders and Churchill Livingstone catered largely to the medical profession and Academic Press focused on science, two areas in which Elsevier had been interested for some time, the Mosby imprint brought a whole new collection to the expanded company: texts for nurses and allied health practitioners. The C.V. Mosby Company was founded by medical practitioner Charles Virgil Mosby, who was part humanitarian, part visionary, part entrepreneur. Combining his desire to serve people with a notion to sell books, in 1906 Mosby began a publishing company dedicated to serving practitioners. He started with medical books, then moved on to the dental field, before publishing his first nursing book in 1917, addressing a pressing war-time need for nursing texts. Today Elsevier, thanks to its Mosby legacy, is the number-one nursing publisher, producing both nursing texts and specialist works on subjects such as critical care, oncology, emergency, mental health, pediatric and maternity nursing.

Tradition of Excellence

Viewed as a whole, the work of the multiple enterprises that makes up the publishing company of Elsevier today is more than Jacobus Robbers could ever have imagined, and yet at its core the company has remained true to his founding mandate — simply to be a very good publishing company, worthy of the Elsevier name. The fact that Elsevier has published the work of every single 2004 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Economic Sciences, Physiology or Medicine, and Physics — not to mention 86 out of 90 of the Chemistry laureates of the past 50 years — is a tribute to that tradition of excellence. However, Elsevier has not succeeded on excellence alone (just look at the fate of the much-esteemed House of Elzevir). Looking back on its history it seems doubtful that Elsevier could have been so successful had it not proven itself willing to take risks that were beyond the ken of Jacobus Robbers, both in terms of innovation and collaboration — be it by publishing the first international journal of biochemistry and biophysics in the 1940s, by helping to found the International Association of STM publishers in 1969 and CrossRef™ in 2000, or by launching revolutionary new services such as ScienceDirect.

Scopus

Elsevier has always been willing to take risks and it continues to take risks, whether through financing a new journal in an emerging field, entering into new collaborative projects, or launching innovative products. Elsevier just recently launched Scopus, the world’s largest abstract and indexing database, which covers more than 14,000 scientific, technical and medical titles. More than 300 researchers and librarians from over 20 institutions around the world were invited to participate in the development process, guiding Scopus’s interface, features and functionality. The result is not only a solution built for scientists by scientists but a testament to Elsevier’s commitment to serving and partnering with the scientific and health community.

Challenges and Opportunities

Looking back at the past reminds us that the challenges and opportunities Elsevier now faces, as it moves into the future, are in some senses familiar ones. Just as in the late 1980s, Elsevier was obliged to revise its pricing system in response to the currency-exchange crisis, so today the company continues to adapt its pricing structures to the changing needs of its customers. Just as in the 1980s the company invested in experimentation to provide those customers with the most up-to-date electronic delivery formats, so today Elsevier continues to invest in the development of many and various new multimedia formats that will provide user communities with information in a number of ways, in a number of places, at any time they may need it. Just as in the 1970s the future of journals was challenged by contracting markets and the introduction of photocopying, today the company continues to address questions about open access to digital sources and issues of copyright in the electronic age. And just as in the 1990s, the company raced to innovate; today it continues to seek out breakthrough technology and products. Although electronic publishing like ScienceDirect, Scopus and MD Consult are at the forefront of publishing innovation today, it remains clear to the company that the second Gutenberg Revolution has only just begun: with obsolescence only ever just one new innovation away, the company must continue to invest in experimentation even when, as has always been the case in science, experiments provide only promises, not guarantees.

The language of science is an ongoing issue for science publishers as well. Just as Latin lost ground to the vernacular in the age of Enlightenment, and German gave way to English after WWII, today the company needs to address the shifting locus of science toward Asia (in China advances in research are rivalling and even exceeding those of the U.S.). In 2004 Elsevier opened its first office in Beijing, and further expansion in Asia seems critical to future growth. This venture into uncharted territory is part of Elsevier’s historical continuum, reaching out to find and disseminate new science and healthcare information beyond all geographic and political boundaries.

False Starts and Quantum Leaps

In summary, Elsevier’s history resembles that of the researchers and practitioners that it serves: it is a story of innumerable contributions that collectively advance science and medicine. Many of those contributions go unnoticed, some are false starts, and the majority are incremental steps. Quantum leaps forward happen, but they are not the norm and even then, like the shift in the primary language of publishing or the migration to electronic formats, they often take years to happen. But as with researchers and practitioners, the constant in Elsevier’s history — one that is reflected in its track record of risks taken, innovations led and mistakes made — is its goal to move forward, and to help its constituents do the same. As the company itself moves forward, this constant, distilled in its signature line — Building Insights. Breaking Boundaries — may ultimately prove the strongest factor in ensuring the longevity of that most resilient of publishing names: Elsevier.

Nobel Laureates